Spending money on hobbies is fine, change my mind.
no. we must spend money on bills then sit motionless until next shift.
The only people deserving fun are the billionaires.
… so long as it does not materially impact your ability to provide basic necessities for your own wellbeing, food, water, shelter, some level of climate control, etc.
… and you are not directly, indirectly, or functionally spending other people’s money on your hobbies.
My friends and me with magic the gathering
If you want to save money, don’t get into bird photography as a hobby. Gear Acquisition Syndrome is fatal to your wallet.
Oh no, the birb left a leg on the beach. Gotta buy a new lens to do better next time.
Please no. I like my kidneys. The next lens up in quality is over $15,000.
That’s why you steal someone else’s kidneys!
Of course, then you’ll need to develop a collection of surgical gear, and likewise you would want to improve that with time…after all, why not take pride in your work?
My hobby of flipping antic gold coins into ponds cost me pretty penny but it’s so rewarding! Once I’m good at it I’ll turn it into a side hustle and it’ll have paid for itself in no time!
there has to be a list of hobbies one can try that cost practically nothing:
Solving Rubik cubes (a high quality speedcube is about 20$)
Crocheting/stitching (needles and yarn after cheap)
Writing (free)
programming
… (please expand if you have any ideas)
D&D costs $90 for the hard cover core book set and $0 for the pirated pdfs.
Biking can have a high upfront cost, but I’ve been using the same bike for 20 years with tune-ups and replacements running in the low three figures over that time.
I’m a big fan of podcasts, particularly ones that cover old movies. Criterion collection films are everywhere, they’re dirt cheap, and they’re classics for a reason.
Cooking is basically better than free.
Yes, ingredients and equipment cost money, but the end result averages out to be cheaper than if you didn’t know how to cook. And even if you take on more expensive ingredients or tools, you’re probably offsetting even more expensive restaurant meals that you would’ve eaten.
Not no-cost but cooking, gotta feed yourself anyway might as well have fun with it
Cooking is cost negative relative to eating out. You just need a decent kitchen and plenty of free time
Crocheting/knitting is cheap to try out but once you really get into it (and start worrying about yarn quality and so on), the money pit opens. Ask me how I know.
As someone who owns a spinning wheel, you can dye and spin yarn at home to make the money pit even wider and deeper!
Writing (free)
Maybe if you only write in dirt with your finger. Orherwise you need writing implements and something to write on.
Actually free things you can do:
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Walking/running
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Stare
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Singing
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Collecting rocks
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Stare
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Sleeping
For walking/running you need proper shoes.
Pretty sure people were walking and running long before shoes ever were invented.
yhea, but it takes years to develop your foot skin to be tough enough for that.
met someone who lived barefoot, his feet were something else.
let’s just say, it isn’t trivial to go back to a life without shoes.
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Drawing, pencil and paper for start and drawing tablets are not that expensive for starter ones and there’s free open source drawing software.
Drawing (we should stop pretending one need expensive material do draw nice things, pencils and erasers are the only requirement, and a good sketch book can be found for less than 15 bucks)
Software development is free if you already have a computer
“needles/yarn after cheap”
That’s a lie. My wife is into knitting and crochet, I’ve seen $300 purchases for yarn only, for just one dress. Not to mention $50-100 needles or swifts or yarn caking tools
true. but I wanted to focus on the cost of entry. not the cost ceiling.
I could walk into a store and get all the materials/tools needed to make a scarf for about 10$. although I could if I wanted to, get expensive yarn and pay 10x or more.
I’ve been into calligraphy for years now - it’s a wonderful hobby with anywhere between absolutely none (pseudocalligraphy with a pencil/bic) and a very low cost to entry (blackletter with a parallel pen) that I seriously encourage anyone to try out! Just be warned that it’s a gateway drug to the fountain pen hobby, which uh.
…
…
quickly becomes a not-cheap hobby. Good god.As an amateur radio operator, I can confirm this as factual. Over.
Between photography, motorcycles, and tools (woodworking/metalworking/automotive) this does seem accurate for me - I have ended up spending a fair chunk of money between these over the years. The tools do mean I can do stuff myself though rather than paying someone else so they at least are less of a money pit.
Every now and then I think paragliding would be an interesting thing to try but I have to tell myself another expensive hobby is hard to justify when I’d like to actually own a place to live some day.
Every now and then I think paragliding would be an interesting thing to try but I have to tell myself another expensive hobby is hard to justify when I’d like to actually own a place to live some day.
What do you mean? You will simply live in your paraglider! You’ll be like one of those birds that stays aloft for months at a time. There you will be, a child of the sky. No need for land. No need for rent. Just a literal leaf on the wind.
You can’t take the sky from me…
Thankfully my hobby is video games so I really only have to buy something to play them on and then I can search for the One Piece if you catch my drift.
Video games are a cheap hobby they said. So many options they said…
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Games played
Yeah… I recently built my first drone.
I wanted to kill a rat in my garden, so I borrowed my parents’ air rifle. but the scope was too tiny to be any use at night, so I bought an air rifle with a bigger scope. but that rifle sucked and an internal part broke, so I bought a proper one. but I still have the crappy one and want to tinker with it, so I printed some replacement parts. but I want to make proper replacement parts that will withstand impact abuse, so I need to turn them on a lathe. but my lathe is just a wood lathe, so I designed and printed a four jaw chuck. but it’s not any good for parts requiring more than one setup, so I bought a cheap real 3 jaw chuck. but it didn’t come with the adapter plate to mount to my spindle, so I tried to buy one. but there doesn’t seem to be any suitable adapter plate for sale that will fit both my chuck and my spindle (there’s one that is close, but would require machining to make it fit - machining that I can’t do without a lathe), so I decided I’ll just drill mount holes through my existing faceplate. but that faceplate isn’t true with the shaft, so if I want to mount my chuck on it and have it be useful then I need to turn it true. but I don’t have carbide tools for metal lathing, so I needed to buy some. and I need to locate the holes that I need to drill to mount the chuck, so I drew up and am printing an template. and that’s where I’m at right now, waiting for that to finish printing, so I can center punch the bolt holes.
so that I can mount a chuck, to turn a replacement part for an air rifle that isn’t even ‘the good one’, to shoot a rat that is digging in my garden and making holes in my yard that’ll twist my ankle eventually
hobbies huh.
And the next thing you know you’re shaving a yak for some reason
one thing that makes me feel better about tasks like this is that I try to double them up with general cleanup
I made a mess of my garage fiddling with all the lathe stuff, but when I cleaned that up, I also did two other outstanding cleanup tasks in there, so it’s a net positive.
well, except for the wallet
new chuck works great, though. now if only I had a carriage and crosslide setup so I didn’t have to turn parts by hand like on a wood lathe, then I could get more accurate parts…
Piracy saves money if you’re already paying for subscriptions. Self hosting adds another way to save money.
But I can’t pirate salt water aquarium fish and corals.
yet
No fishing pole?
Landlocked state. Best I can do is pond, lake, and river fish, definitrly not corals. I would like to try bryozoans in my freshwater tank.
Plant and micro life terrariums do seem cool.
You’ll need a bigger tank, but Bull Sharks make it up to MO.
Fr tho blue gill and the like are fun. Cats you get too big too fast unless you have >50gal.
I have a 75 gallon with loaches and and angelfish as the bigger tankmates. There is one large synodontis and some of the plecos are getting rather hefty.
Papa Loach, the smaller of the two finally got in a good photo spot to measure him recently:
Damn! I did not know loaches got that big. That’s impressive!
Dojo/weather loaches do. Most types get to a good size but I think these are the biggest.
I have below beginner level astrophotography gear, and I’ve still spent over $500 on it. A proper tracking mount costs somewhere in the ballpark of $1,000, and that’s just the mount. Granted I’m happy with the OTAs I have, so I’m probably not buying a new scope for a while
yeah, $500 is tough to get into astro with.
plenty for general photography, but astro can get gear heavy fast. astro landscapes are becoming more accessible as more fast lenses get cheaper, but the kind of astro that needs a tracker is just pricy.
Yeah, I really thought I could just put some elbow grease into a Canon EOS 300D and a Celestron Astromaster 130EQ and make it work… at least I know that I’m into this hobby, and I know what upgrades I need to make
Once I’m making significantly more than minimum wage, this hobby is going to pop off
